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This quotation gave us the name of our website. It is taken from Fra Lippo Lippi, a great epic poem by Robert Browning. It is the ramblings of the somewhat rebellious monk, Lippo Lippi, who yearns and strives to express, through his painterly, artistic bent, the importance of the world around us.

Faith is not a blind or mindless thing. God commands us to love him with all our mind, as well as with heart and soul and strength (Luke 10:27). Lippo Lippi added, “God uses us to help each other so,/ Lending our minds out.” There is meaning and purpose in everything God has made; in everything that happens to us and around us. To find and explore that meaning is the stuff of our human existence, and the illumination through which we glimpse the eternal purpose underlying it all.

The great writer G. K. Chesterton said, “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.”

We want to try our faith to the very core, to the roots, because we know it will never be found wanting. God himself will never be found wanting.

Have you ever thought, or did you know, that Christianity is the only faith in which the great Deity of the faith constantly urges us to try him, to test him, to see if he is true to his Word, to his promises?

We are to honour Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defence to anyone who asks for a reason for the hope that is in us, with gentleness and respect (1 Peter 3:15).

The full poem Fra Lippo Lippi is quite a read, but well worth the investment of your time. You can find the full text here.

The fellow we have adopted as our avatar is a Galapagos blue-footed booby. These funny, silly, fabulously designed creatures have become our icon for the glory and the humour that our great Creator has lavished on his creation, seemingly for the sheer pleasure of it.

“But ask the beasts, and they will teach you;
the birds of the heavens, and they will tell you;
or the bushes of the earth, and they will teach you;
and the fish of the sea will declare to you.
Who among all these does not know
that the hand of the Lord has done this?
In his hand is the life of every living thing
and the breath of all mankind.”

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my meat and drink

“When death, the great Reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.”

George Eliot: Adam Bede

my meat and drink

“When death, the great Reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.”

George Eliot: Adam Bede

my meat and drink

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea."

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

my meat and drink

“The unthankful heart discovers no mercies; but let the thankful heart sweep through the day and, as the magnet finds the iron, so it will find, in every hour, some heavenly blessings."

Henry Ward Beecher

my meat and drink

“Conviction without experience makes for harshness. ”

Flannery O'Connor: The Habit of Being

my meat and drink

“When I give food to the poor they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food they call me a communist.”

Helda Camara

my meat and drink

"At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough."

Toni Morrison

my meat and drink

"The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children."

Dietrich Bonhoffer

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"It’s not a question of God sending us to Hell. In each of us is something growing up which will of itself be Hell unless it is nipped in the bud."

C S Lewis

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"We can easily forgive a child who’s afraid of the dark. The real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light."

Plato

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"Dumbledore to Harry Potter: 'It’s our choices, Harry that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.'”

J K Rowling

my meat and drink

"The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page."

St Augustine

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“I was obliged to be industrious. Whoever is equally industrious will succeed equally well.”

J S Bach

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"Care and diligence bring luck.”

Thomas Fuller

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"We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another."

Jonathan Swift

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"In our life there is a single colour, as on an artist's palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love."

Marc Chagall

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"The patience of the bricklayer is assumed in the dream of the architect."

Gael Turnbull

my meat and drink

"I do not listen to a man who tells me how to solve the world's problems if he cannot solve his own personal problems. If a man's home is in a state of discord, his opinions about the state of the nation or the state of the world are purely theoretical."

Dr Martyn LLoyd-Jones

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“It's easier to bleed than sweat, Mr. Motes.”

Flannery O'Connor

my meat and drink

"I was irrevocably bethrothed to laughter, the sound of which has always seemed to me to be the most civilized music in the world."

Peter Ustinov

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“Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.”

George Eliot: Impressions of Theophrastus Such

my meat and drink

"Happiness is like a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you."

Nathaniel Hawthorne

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"Que l’importance soit dans ton regard, non dans la chose regardée."

Andre Gide

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“One must be poor to know the luxury of giving.”

George Eliot

my meat and drink

"Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls. The most massive characters are seared with scars."

Kahil Gibran

my meat and drink

“It’s easy to be independent when you’ve got money. But to be independent when you haven’t got a thing—that’s the Lord’s test.”

Mahalia Jackson

my meat and drink

"Life was meant to be lived, and curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life."

Eleanor Roosevelt

my meat and drink

"The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone."

Harriet Beecher Stowe

my meat and drink

“You have to motivate yourself with challenges. That’s how you know you’re still alive. Once you start doing only what you’ve proven you can do, you’re on the road to death.”

Jerry Seinfeld

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"There is nothing more ugly than orthodoxy without understanding and without compassion."

Francis Schaeffer

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"Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully. "

Samuel Johnson

my meat and drink

"Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God."

John Bradshaw

my meat and drink

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

Mark Twain

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"The evil that we do does not attract to us so much persecution and hatred as our good qualities."

La Rochefoucauld

my meat and drink

“I think of these desert years of mine, not of my choosing. Maybe if it were all smooth and comfortable, if my pride and professionalism were defining life for me, God's steel-quiet, penetrating word would have been lost in the babble and sheen of success.”

Luci Shaw

my meat and drink

"Courage consists not in hazarding without fear, but being resolutely minded in a just cause."

"Nothing will sustain you more potently than the power to recognize in your humdrum routine, as perhaps it may be thought, the true poetry of life—the poetry of the commonplace, of the ordinary man, of the plain, toil-worn woman, with their loves and their joys, their sorrows and their griefs.”

Sir William Osler

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"You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face."

Eleanor Roosevelt

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"The influence of women is subtle and remote, but it is on this account all the more powerful, for they sit at the very fountains where the river of human life is springing, and where a touch may determine its entire subsequent course."

James Stalker

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"You only have power over people as long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything he’s no longer in your power—he’s free again."

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

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"If you stand up and be counted, from time to time you may get yourself knocked down. But remember this: A man flattened by an opponent can get up again. A man flattened by conformity stays down for good."

Thomas J Watson

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"It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. But it is a much more fearful thing to fall out of them."

D H Lawrence

my meat and drink

“Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not.”